Digital Rights Management and Regime-Shifting: The Implications of Backdoor Propertization of Creative Works in Digital Copyright Law for Digital Dist

From online shopping to cross-border accessing and disseminating digitised in copyright materials for entertainment and educational purposes, the continuous development of the internet has shaped the way in which its users manage their daily lives and businesses; consequently creating a progressively transnational digital society. Thus, it is no new feat that the internet's simpler and inexpensive modes of information dissemination, and access to knowledge (A2K), has brought to the fore economic concerns for copyright right-holders at the prospect of losing control over their digitised content.

As a consequence, it is also no new phenomenon that content right-holders have sought strengthened intellectual property rights (IPRs) from various angles including, lobbying policymakers and use of technical protection measure (TPM) enabled digital rights management (DRM) systems as an additional layer of control over their digitised content. The use of TPMs is, in part, a consequence of traditional copyright law's difficulty in keeping pace with technological advancements; which has arguably contributed to the contours of copyright law's paradigm (the 'paradigm') becoming blurred.

One area in which TPMs as a mode of regulation blurs the paradigm's contours pertains to A2K of digitised in-copyright works for digital distance learning (DDL) purposes. As evidence suggests TPMs have been utilised, as an additional later of in copyright content protection, by copyright right-holders to control A2K beyond the scope of governance prescribed anti-circumvention laws that regulate TPMs.

As such, this research explores Directive 2001/29/EC's7 (Infosoc) Art.6 anticircumvention measures and aims to establish that Art.6(4)'s ambiguous wording, when interpreted and implemented into EU member state domestic laws, functions as a backdoor to increased IPRs for copyright right-holders; by creating an avenue for right-holders to 'regime-shift.' In view of this, the analysis considers the implications

of backdoor propertization of creative works for end-users accessing and utilising knowledge for DDL purposes under Infosoc's Art.5(3)(a) teaching exception. This approach is undertaken due to existing contention surrounding the extent to which educators, as end-users, have the ability to digitally disseminate in-copyright content for educational purposes.

Due to this contention and the myriad of implementation of Art.6 Infosoc into national laws, this research narrows its line of enquiry by predominantly analysing Art.6(4)'s implementation into the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988's s.32 (Illustration for instruction) and the topical s.29A Text and Data-Mining (TDM) exception. This approach aims to strengthen its position that backdoor IPRs place

burdens upon end-users' ability to access knowledge for educational purposes. Due to this burden, this project argues that digital copyright law requires reform to support economic and societal development by extending the scope of Art.5 Infosoc's exceptions and limitations (E&Ls). As literature consulted suggests that the current E&Ls afford limited protection to end-users' ability to exercise their fundamental

Art.5(3)(a) right to disseminate and access digitised in-copyright materials outwith traditional education institutional setting for DDL purposes.

This argument for reform will be explored with attention paid to the requirement of supplementary measures to safeguard the paradigm's protection of the interests of creators and copyright right-holders.